I love it. I love the attitude of “yes” that I discover when traveling alone. I love the lens through which I experience the world when out in it… alone. Mountains become more personal, food becomes an enrapturing experience, meeting new people becomes a beginning, and brief moments that may otherwise go unnoticed become an entire education on life.

Don’t get me wrong, I also love traveling with others. My husband, my friends, my family… They all help to shape the experience in a unique and delightful way. Quite naturally, different activities are chosen: one friend will plunge with me into the icy waters of a secret swimming hole, another will prioritize the hip restaurant downtown and compliment my eclectic (read: clueless) sense of style, and the up-for-anything one will nonchalantly lead the way into an almost-overnight-epic adventure that becomes the reason I don’t go anywhere without a headlamp and a snack.

More significantly, the relationship with my co-traveler is often times more defining of the travel than the activities themselves. My energy is directed at least partially towards my companion, narrowing to some degree the focus of my experience. When with another, even with open eyes and a spirit for adventure, part of my attention is placed on that person, on their enjoyment, on our connection, on the shared experience. While the shared nature of the journey enhances our connection, I am less aware of what possibilities might be discovered on the periphery of the path.

Alone, I am more able to see the world as it exists around me, to feel the tiny vibrations of the hummingbird’s wings behind me, to stop and listen to the wind as it whips over the ridgeline. I am able to speak to the person I have just met and really hear them, see them, learn from them, be open to joining them for a coffee or receive the book they want to lend me. I am able to slow down, to show up, to participate, and to receive.

On a multi-day solo in Big Sur in 2013, I was asked by a couple that I encountered on the trail why it was that I was alone… and I responded quite simply “because I like the company I keep.”

That company is me… and it is also the company of every other living and non-living thing around me…

I am captivated by the world.

Earlier in June I spent three and a half weeks in Colorado. What began back in January as a trip to attend a conference, morphed over time into a rite-of-passage-like transition out of my existing job and into private practice, a life of more freedom…and less certainty.

Nothing could have been more fitting to mark the transition than to drive West the day after I left work. Colorado is where I discovered my strength. It’s where I moved after college and learned that I could do more than I thought I could. It’s where I fell deeper into love, it’s where I began working in outdoor education and witnessed profound moments of healing and growth in the wilderness, it’s where I found my own voice, it’s where I’ve returned multiple times and each time discovered that I was there to mark a transition or to remember something I had started to forget.

This trip was no different, although I had no idea what I was getting into…

And that’s the thing about traveling alone…. You just don’t know what you’re getting into… and it’s incredibly exciting

Although much of my trip was spent with others, both new and old friends, the spirit of traveling alone, of being the one to decide my activities and itinerary, the only one to consider at the beginning of each day, resulted in taking opportunities and noticing aspects of life that I would not have seen had I been with another person. The lens I carried while traveling was wide angle, I was open to possibility, I was receptive to the world.

Some moments of receptivity captured:

Driving into the wall of death in Kansas…. Bracing for impact, aware of the life force of this earth that is so much larger than ourselves

Aspens budding in the foothills above Boulder. Life beginning…again

Ever deepening conversations over a three and a half hour meal in which I am so delighted with the food, the wine, the company, the attention, that I invite the server to join us at least five times. Each bite is the best thing I have ever put in my mouth, because I am consuming more than the food… I am inhaling the entire experience.

I sit in a field under the full moon, warm breeze filling my lungs, no where to be but here and now.

A decision to attend a pop-up restaurant in Boulder (www.blankplateboulder.com). I didn't take any photos, but this purple flower with cairns from Chautauqua Park captures some of the spirit of the night. I bring friends but end up sitting across from and with people I don’t know, enjoying conversations about both the meaningful and the delightfully meaningless. I remember the joys of casual yet authentic conversation with people I will never see again, until I bump into them on my way to coffee the next morning…

Climbing with a friend I haven’t seen in years, she teaches me about multi-pitch climbing, and about raising kids, and the never ending process of self-discovery. We spontaneously go to a local hot springs after climbing and lay in the warm waters listening to our neighbor’s discuss theories on the atomic apocalypse and how one of them feels completely prepared…

Out of a conference that occurs only every three years, I am introduced to programs happening all over the world run by inspiring people serving the same mission: the 7th International Adventure Therapy conference. I learn of new programming being created for veterans. I am intrigued by the spirit of the people and places of Norway (I have to go there!). I receive a kukui nut from Hawaii. My creative mind is propelled into ideas and actions for my new business back home. And, most significantly, I meet an Australian who also wants to go to the San Juan mountains…the part of my trip I had been most looking forward to that almost didn’t happen.

And so… we went…

And in the San Juan mountains of Colorado I learn about the canyons of Australia, I sink into soft snow and route-find in the dark, I deflower my virgin ice axe, I trust my decision making,

I share the quiet of the high mountains... and baptize myself in the snow run-off as I exit that sacred place.

Upon returning home I have been asking myself, how can I keep this spirit of receptivity going? How can I keep the sense of discovery alive? It is all too easy to fall into routine, to be with familiar faces and places and lose the attitude I have when traveling alone… lose the ability to be more fully present, to be more open to possibility, to see and hear people with whom I share only a momentary interaction.

I am finding it to be a practice, like anything else in life I guess. Writing about it helps me remember to keep practicing. Small “adventures” alone help me to tap back in: tea with a new acquaintance, shopping at a different grocery store, a change in my running route, exploring a different part of our local wilderness, saying yes to babysitting for a friend- definitely an adventure. And of course, in the back of my mind, wondering when and where the next solo adventure will occur…

A solo swimming hole, location never to be disclosed... Fall 2013

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